Make your own view¶
DownloadMixin¶
The django_downloadview.views.DownloadMixin
class is not a view. It
is a base class which you can inherit of to create custom download views.
DownloadMixin
is a base of BaseDownloadView, which itself is a base of
all other django_downloadview’s builtin views.
BaseDownloadView¶
The django_downloadview.views.BaseDownloadView
class is a base
class to create download views. It inherits DownloadMixin and
django.views.generic.base.View
.
The only thing it does is to implement
get
: it triggers
DownloadMixin's render_to_response
.
Serving a file inline rather than as attachment¶
Use attachment
to make a view serve a file inline rather
than as attachment, i.e. to display the file as if it was an internal part of a
page rather than triggering “Save file as…” prompt.
See details in attachment API documentation
.
from django_downloadview import ObjectDownloadView
#: Serve ``file`` attribute of ``Document`` model, inline (not as attachment).
Handling http not modified responses¶
Sometimes, you know the latest date and time the content was generated at, and
you know a new request would generate exactly the same content. In such a case,
you should implement was_modified_since()
in your
view.
Note
Default was_modified_since()
implementation
trusts file wrapper’s was_modified_since
if any. Else (if calling
was_modified_since()
raises NotImplementedError
or
AttributeError
) it returns True
, i.e. it assumes the file was
modified.
As an example, the download views above always generate “Hello world!”… so, if the client already downloaded it, we can safely return some HTTP “304 Not Modified” response:
from django.core.files.base import ContentFile
from django_downloadview import VirtualDownloadView
class TextDownloadView(VirtualDownloadView):
def get_file(self):
"""Return :class:`django.core.files.base.ContentFile` object."""
return ContentFile("Hello world!", name='hello-world.txt')
def was_modified_since(self, file_instance, since):
return False # Never modified, always "Hello world!".